RE: Openness, transparency. technocrats, and burocrats

["Jaro" <jaro-10kbq@sympatico.ca>]

A somewhat curious supplement to the discussion of dam safety by Jim Dukelow

one month ago (see further below) is this article :



http://www.oneworld.ca/external/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.probeinternational.org

%2Fpi%2Findex.cfm%3FDSP%3Dcontent%26ContentID%3D9158

Three Gorges Probe

December 18/2003

Dam on dangerous ground

by Kelly Haggart and Mu Lan



Just minutes after a pair of powerful earthquakes jolted China's northwest

Gansu province in late October, workers raced to release massive amounts of

water stored behind two damaged dams.

The tremors, measuring 6.1 and 5.8 on the Richter scale, hit the Zhangye

region at 8:41 p.m. and 8:48 p.m. on Oct. 25. By 9 p.m., water was already

being discharged from the two reservoirs in Minle county.



The quakes "threatened the safety of two dams," China Daily reported. Cracks

five centimetres wide had opened in the walls of the Shuangshuzhi reservoir,

while the Zhaizhaizi reservoir had developed a fissure one centimetre wide

and 410 metres long, the newspaper reported.



Tuo Xingfu, head of Minle county, said water was drained from the reservoirs

over the course of the next two days, reducing the stored amounts to safe

levels. He added that a third reservoir, in Nangu township, had also

sustained serious damage.



Ten people and 16,000 head of livestock died in the quakes. More than 14,000

houses collapsed and 45,000 others were damaged, rendering thousands

homeless in freezing temperatures. People huddled overnight inside wheat

stacks until tents and other emergency aid could reach the area.



It was a horrendous event. But many lives were no doubt saved by the dam

authorities' swift response, which may well have averted a much worse

catastrophe.



How safe is the Three Gorges dam, which has been constructed in another of

China's seismically active regions? The issue was addressed wholly

inadequately in the Canadian-funded feasibility study for the dam, U.S.

hydrologist Philip Williams concluded after reviewing that study. (His

critique is contained in the Probe International/Earthscan book Damming the

Three Gorges: What Dam Builders Don't Want You To Know.)



Around the world, earthquakes have damaged dams, and have also been caused

by them. "Reservoir-induced seismicity" has been recorded even in areas with

no previous history of tremors. In one such case, a reservoir in western

India triggered a magnitude-6.3 quake in 1967 that killed 200 people and

seriously damaged the Koyna dam.



"Earthquakes caused by big reservoirs are not unprecedented," Xin Zhiguo, a

professor at the Chongqing Environmental Science Research Institute, was

quoted as saying in July. "There have been 102 induced earthquakes

throughout the world, and China has suffered 16 of them. Therefore, this is

a very important problem."



As many as 1,000 micro-quakes occurred in the Three Gorges area in early

June while the reservoir was being filled to the 135-metre level, Xu

Guangbin, director of the Hubei Seismological Monitoring and Prevention

Centre, told 21st Century Economic Report (Ershiyi shiji jingji baodao).



"These minor tremors have had no significant impact on the dam or reservoir,

and have caused no damage," Mr. Xu was quoted as saying. "It's normal and to

be expected because of the filling of the reservoir."



Bigger quakes, with magnitudes of 6 to 6.5, are to be expected once the

reservoir is filled to its final level of 175 metres in 2009, the newspaper

said, adding that these tremors should pose no risk to the dam structures,

which are designed to withstand earthquakes of magnitude 7.



Despite these assurances, experts are worried that strong quakes could have

disastrous consequences in the geologically fragile Three Gorges region. For

instance, an earthquake could destabilize old landslides and send masses of

rock and mud cascading down onto towns or crashing into the reservoir. (In

July, a huge landslide fell into the Qinggan River in Zigui county, killing

at least two dozen people and completely blocking that Yangtze tributary.

Explosives had to be used a week later to clear the river for navigation.)



Li Ping and Li Yuanjun, both civil engineering professors at Wuhan

University, believe the seismicity of the Three Gorges reservoir area is a

real cause for concern. Writing on the website of the Chinese Academy of

Engineering, of which Li Ping is a member, they call for more resources to

be put into investigating the region's seismic problems.



Their own research focuses on two major zones of seismic activity, the

Enshi-Badong and Xiannushan faults. "We are particularly concerned that both

of these strong seismic fault lines lie near the dam site, passing beneath

the reservoir," they write.



"The north end of the Enshi-Badong fault extends as far as the new county

seat of Badong, while the Xiannushan fault is located just 10 kilometres

upstream of the dam. A medium or strong earthquake would set off a chain of

events in the reservoir area, with a series of landslides and riverbank

collapses being triggered near the epicentre.



"The consequences could be dreadful to contemplate, quite unimaginable in

fact. We therefore urge the government and project authorities to pay more

attention to this issue."



The authors write that a magnitude-5.2 earthquake occurred along the

Xiannushan fault on March 8, 1961, and another, measuring 5.1, took place

along the Enshi-Badong fault on May 22, 1979. The epicentre of the latter

was just 10 km from the site of the new county seat of Badong, 80 km

upstream of the dam. They say that an even stronger quake, probably between

magnitude 6 and 7, was recorded in 1856 in the Daluba area at the south end

of the Enshi-Badong fault, on the border between Chongqing municipality and

Hubei province.



"One of the most pressing issues now is to gain a thorough understanding of

the relationship between seismic activity and other geological disasters,

and then to determine key technical parameters for prevention and control

projects," they write. "Equally important, further studies are needed to

explore whether there are more strong seismic faults in the reservoir area

between Badong and Chongqing."



The authors cite official statistics that categorize 2,490 locations in the

Three Gorges area as threatened by landslides or riverbank collapses. Before

the reservoir was filled in June, residents were moved away from 232 of the

most dangerous places, while remedial work was undertaken at 198 sites.



"In the past two years, the government has invested four billion yuan

[US$485 million] in projects to prevent and control geological disasters in

the Three Gorges area," they write, but argue that more funds and personnel

are urgently needed to undertake vital seismic research in the region.

<end quote>





-----Original Message-----

From: owner-radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu

[mailto:owner-radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu]On Behalf Of Dukelow, James S Jr

Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 8:17 PM

To: radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu

Subject: FW: Openness, transparency. technocrats, and burocrats



A message I sent to RISKANAL a few months ago has some relevance to the

current RADSAFE discussion of dam safety.



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



-----Original Message-----

From: Dukelow, James S Jr

Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 11:07 PM

To: riskanal@lyris.pnl.gov

Subject: Openness, transparency. technocrats, and burocrats



I have been reading an interesting book, _River Town_, written by Peter

Hessler, who spent two years in the mid-90s as a Peace Corpsman teaching

English Literature at Fuling Teachers College in Fuling, Sichuan, a city of

about 200,000 at the confluence of the Wu River with the Yangtze River.



On pages 115-116 I ran into the paragraph, in the context of a discussion of

the Three Gorges Dam project:



"But there is also the history of Henan province, where heavy rains in 1975

caused 62 modern dams to fall like dominoes, one after another, and 230,000

people died.  Although the scale of that particular disaster was unique, the

poor engineering is less unusual: 3,200 Chinese dams have burst since 1949.

In this century, the failure rate of Chinese dams is 3.7 percent, compared

to 0.6 percent in the rest of the world."



The raised my eyebrows, since I had written a paper in the mid-90s that had

me reviewing the history of dam failures, and I had not run into these.



Doing the obvious, I Googled "Henan 1975 dam failure".  That turned up a few

dozen hits, a couple of which were pretty interesting.  Thayer Watkins of

the San Jose State University Economics Department has a white paper, "The

Catastrophic Dam Failures in China in August 1975", available at

<www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm>.



The reason I hadn't heard of these dam failures is that the Chinese

government had suppressed the story for twenty years, until Human Rights

Watch/Asia blew the whistle on them in a contra-Three-Gorges white paper

published in 1995.  The dam failures were the result of a typhoon that came

further inland than usual, and dumped a meter of rain in three days in Henan

province.  The Banqiao Dam on the Ru River and the Shimantan Dam on the Hong

River, both tributaries of the Huang He (Yellow River) system, were both

designed for an approximately 0.5 meter three day rainfall -- purportedly

500- and 1000-year floods.  The failure of these dams released 600,000,000

cubic meters of water in a few hours.  85,000 died in the flooding and

another 145,000 died in epidemics and famine in the aftermath of the

flooding.



The other 60 dams either failed independently because of the beyond design

basis flood or as a consequence of the failure of Banqiao and Shimantan.



Watkins writes:



"The Vice Premier also asserted that primacy should be given to water

accumulation for irrigation.  A hydrologist named Chen Xing objected to this

policy on the basis that it would lead to water logging and alkalinization

of farm land due to a high water table produced by the dams.  Not only were

the warnings of Chen Xing ignored but political officials changed his design

for the largest reservoir on the plains.  Chen Xing, on the basis of his

expertise as a hydrologist, recommended twelve sluice gates but this was

reduced to five by critics who said Chen was being too conservative.  Chen

Xing was sent to Xinyang."



"When problems with the water system developed in 1961 a new Party official

in Henan brought Chen Xing back to help solve the problems.  But Chen Xing

criticized elements of the Great Leap Forward and was purged as a

"right-wing opportunist."



All of this excites several resonances.



A few years ago, Sheila Jasanoff had a one-page op-ed in Nature that argued

that the root cause of several technological disasters was that ordinary

people (read non-engineers, non-scientists) had been frozen out of the

design/operations decision making process.  This set me off on an extended

RISKANAL rant, because the examples she used were all cases in which the

technical input had been diluted/subverted/sabotaged/contravened by

management and politicians with other agenda, rather like what seems to have

happened with the Henan dams.



To this day, noone outside China knows for sure how many people died in the

great Tangshan earthquake of 1976, because of a similar cover-up.  Estimates

range between the official 240,000 and 750,000.



Although one can argue that the Henan and Tangshan cover-ups didn't harm

anyone, that is clearly not the case with the Chinese government's SARS

cover-up, which has probably destroyed the opportunity to eradicate the

epidemic when it was just a few cases in Guangdong, using the isolation and

infection control techniques that appear to have worked in Vietnam and

perhaps a few other places.



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my

management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.





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